Andy Warhol’s obsession with celebrity was one of the defining aspects of his career, and analyses of that career, not to mention of his life, often fixate on it—he gets blamed for everything from our own celebrity obsessions to the narcissism that has become the ugly hallmark of the social media age. What’s lost in that narrative is any attention that might otherwise be paid to his overtly political work and experiments in abstraction (his Piss, Oxidation and Cum series works were both more boring and more beautiful than you might imagine), not to mention any exploration into the person, particularly the queer person, behind the prints and the persona.
In his quest to edge as close as possible to fame and glamor, Warhol surrounded himself with celebrities and documented the comings and goings of The Factory crowd in photos and film. His portrait series, in particular, portrayed the faces of celebrity, capturing the vulnerability beneath fame’s facade. But what lurked behind his facade? “Looking at Andy Looking,” which opened at New York’s Museum of Sex during Armory Week, offers some clue. Organized by the museum in partnership with The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, it considers both voyeuristic elements of Warhol’s work and the complexities of identity and self-perception that can be gleaned therefrom.
On show here are sixteen titles from 1963 and 1964, half of which have never been screened before, chosen by Greg Pierce, former director of film and video at The Warhol Museum. Anchoring “Looking at Andy Looking” are the most personal and most illuminating works in the exhibition—the iconic Sleep with John Giorno, the salacious but mysterious Blow Job and the feature-length, only sometimes pornographic Couch—as well as portraits of Denis Deegan, Cliff Jarr and Philip Fagan.
Presenting them in the Museum of Sex—versus The Andy Warhol Museum (which holds the copyright to Warhol’s films) or, say, MoMA (responsible for storing the originals)—is an interesting choice. One has to wonder whether some casual Warhol fans and/or art lovers whose Waholian horizons would be broadened by exposure to these works will choose to give this one a pass. Ardent fans, on the other hand, will know that the overt innocuousness of Warhol’s most popular screenprints is, in some ways, very much at odds with his enduring interest in the taboo. Indeed, his work often addressed themes of sexuality and the body, as seen in series like the explicit Sex Parts and the gender- and sexuality-focused Ladies and Gentlemen. He gravitated toward the scandalous and the marginal, documenting elements of underground culture that traditional museums shied away from.“We’ve made it our mission to blur the line between ‘high’ art and ‘low’ art, and really, Warhol was the same way—for all his fame and influence, he refused to take himself too seriously,” Ariel Plotek, the Museum of Sex’s chief curator, told Observer.
According to Pierce, curator of “Looking at Andy Looking,” this show could be and probably should be exhibited at The Andy Warhol Museum, though there are currently no plans to make that happen. Last month, we caught up with him to find out more about how this exhibition came together and what it can teach us about the Pop iconoclast.
What can you tell me about how this collaboration between The Andy Warhol Museum and the Museum of Sex came about?
The Museum of Sex originally approached The Andy Warhol Museum hoping to arrange a static art show. Luckily for me, and the past and future audiences of “Looking at Andy Looking,” that didn’t come to fruition. The Warhol and MoMA have been step-parents to Warhol’s film work since 1997. The Andy Warhol Museum is the rights holder of the material, and MoMA is the caretaker of the physical material. In 2014, the two organizations embarked on The Andy Warhol Film Digitization Project, which was an effort to digitally scan and eventually make available all of Warhol’s film work made between 1963 and 1977. This body of work totals approximately half a million feet of footage.
What is someone going to discover here if they’re primarily familiar with Warhol’s silkscreens?
They will find themselves immersed in a world of moving images that is unique in its singular vision and one that has been brought about by the existence of one shy, sickly, queer boy born at the gateway to the Midwest during the Great Depression. And they’ll discover that anything is possible.
What do you think these early videos meant to Warhol?
The 16mm films in this show are both art and chronicle. Some critics back in the day referred to them as avant-garde home movies, which is an intelligent way to view them. Warhol wrote in POPism: The Warhol ‘60s, “As one reviewer pointed out, our movies may have looked like home movies, but then our home wasn’t like anybody else’s.”
In his work, did he deliberately set out to titillate?
No, provoke would be a better word. You get noticed more as a provocateur than as a titillator.
We’re living in a moment when LGBTQ+ Americans are once again facing increased political scrutiny, so the show feels timely. Was Warhol political in his queerness? If so, does that manifest in the show?
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Yes, but not in some politically conscious way. Warhol was a radical queer filmmaker because he didn’t pretend to be anyone but who he was, even when he was playing the part of the great pretender. I hope that everyone who visits the exhibition leaves with their own interpretation of the films and footage I’ve chosen to exhibit and play off of one another. I believe it’s a rich stew.
How was curating at the Museum of Sex versus at The Warhol different? Could you stage this show there?
I was able to creatively and intelligently use my thirty-plus years of Warhol film and video expertise to curate “Looking at Andy Looking” at the Museum of Sex, which is something that I was not allowed to do in my previous position at The Warhol. The exhibition could, and should, be exhibited at The Andy Warhol Museum, but I don’t believe there are plans to do so.
What do you think it says about Andy Warhol that his work so readily fits in at what could be seen as, for lack of a better way of putting it, highbrow and lowbrow institutions? No disrespect to the Museum of Sex intended, of course.
I return again to the idea of wanting to be noticed. Warhol’s genius was his ability to create something in any medium and to get noticed because of it. Fine artist or pornographer? One of the most important artists of the 20th Century or sheer fraud? He was all them. There was a lot of money to be made straddling fences.
